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Google: Android update waits are “very reasonable”

A senior Android employee has claimed the frustratingly long waits users endure to receive a new major update of Android are actually not that bad.

In Google+ post congratulating Sony on the recent release of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) for its Tablet S, Jean-Baptiste Queru, the technical lead developer on the Android Open Source Project, revealed the time it’s taking for ICS to hit devices is nothing to get up in arms about.

“It took Sony only about five months to ship this after I released the code in the Android Open Source Project at the very end of last year,” he said, adding that this is actually “a very reasonable time, since under the hood Ice Cream Sandwich is quite different from Honeycomb (and upgrades from Gingerbread are likely to take longer as those differences are huge)”.

ICS made its debut last November on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and has since hit only a handful of non-Google devices. However, Queru admits there’s an unwarranted delay in the OS upgrade reaching older Google handsets, although he said this is more to do with the networks than the search giant itself.

“The part that blows my mind is that some variants of the Google-engineered flagship devices still haven't received Ice Cream Sandwich (or are stuck with older versions of Ice Cream Sandwich) because of delays introduced by operator approvals.

“I'm very glad that Google is back in the business of selling phones directly without any middlemen to interfere, and I'll be even happier when I see that program expanded to more countries.”

Google is reportedly already working on a fourth Nexus-branded handset, rumoured to be manufactured by Samsung again.

Do you think new Android updates take too long to be released on most devices with the hardware credentials to support them? Let us know in the comments section below.

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